Eklektikos , the title says it: your practice is eclectic. There are nevertheless recurrences such as the portrait and the landscape. So, are you eclectic?
I have always tried to be as sincere as possible, not to lock myself in the shackles of fashion. Watching the great exhibition, I realize that there are common lines: the passage of time, death, but also renewal in nature. And empathy for people. It’s always linked to time, to my interest in the history of art, in terrible repeating events.
Is there a difference in the way you approach a subject?
Drawing is very important to me – I have been teaching it for 40 years. I work with models, I always have my sketchbooks with me. Currently I do large portraits [d’individus] that I want to show next to mountain portraits. Same wrinkles, same textures. The emotion in front of a landscape or a person triggers the desire to decipher it, to understand it and almost to appropriate it.
You have just produced the small interior-exterior formats. Are they the expression of the confinement into which the pandemic has pushed us?
For years I have been documenting dilapidated or abandoned houses in Romania, Sicily, Cyprus, Cuba. I am drawn to their textures and colors, their mystery. Book covers, also abandoned and discarded, had been in my studio for over twenty years. I don’t know if I started the series as an expression of confinement, but the fact that I couldn’t travel made me look back to what I had on hand, the objects and ideas that were there to wait.